A communication network is generally a large distributed system for receiving information (e.g., a signal) and transmitting the information to a destination. Over the past few decades the demand for communication access has dramatically increased. Although conventional wire and fiber landlines, cellular networks, and geostationary satellite systems have continuously been increasing to accommodate the growth in demand, the existing communication infrastructure is still not large enough to accommodate the increase in demand. The growth in demand is mainly attributable to the coming together of different technological systems that perform similar tasks. These technological systems perform different functions, such as voice (e.g., telephone service), data (e.g., World Wide Web), and video (e.g., television broadcast), and have now converged and share the same resources and interact with each other synergistically. The telecommunications convergence led to the rise and advancement of digital communication due to the delivery of text, audio, and video over the same wired, wireless, or fiber optic connections.
Due to the constant increase in the number of devices that a communication network supports, telecommunication service providers have developed ways to distribute accurate time and information over the communication infrastructure. The communication infrastructure includes an optical line terminal (OLT) that sends a multiplexed signal (where the signal includes audio, video, and data signals) to a remote node, which ultimately distributes the received signal to multiple ends users. High-precision time is important in a communication network. For example, femtocell or picocell stations in 4G/LTE communication networks depend on the accurate time and frequency for time-division duplexing (TDD) and frequency-division duplexing (FDD). One of the methods used to improve the communication system is to configure the OLT as a master server that receives high-precision time directly from a satellite of a Global Positioning System (GPS) and delivers phase and frequency signals via IEEE-1588 Precision Time Protocol (PTP) or Synchronous Ethernet (SyncE).
Currently, GPS based time master server architecture supports a very limited number of clients due to constraints in the computation resources of the time master server. The time master server architecture fails to provide a scalable architecture due to its limited computation resources.